New Exposure
Overview
‘Berlin to Baghdad: Children of Conflict’, will begin in May 2008. We will be working with groups of young people who live along the historic route of the Berlin to Baghdad Railway Line. In each country we will work with young people whose lives have been dominated by the affects of violent conflict.
Our courses will take place over four weeks. As well as teaching the basics of photojournalism, we get the participants to discuss local and personal issues and consider how photography can be used to express them. Using quality high-resolution cameras donated to us by Olympus Cameras UK we will introduce them to the basics of photography before mentoring them through completing individual photo-essays about their own lives and stories. We will then exhibit a selection of their images and publish them in a book about the project.
In Syria we will work with a group of young Iraqi refugees. Since the Iraq war and the brutal sectarian violence it unleashed on the Iraqi population Iraqi people have fled their homes in fear of the lives. However, the stories of these people have received little coverage in mainstream media. 1.5 million Iraqis fled to neighbouring Syria but have not been granted official refugee status leaving them unable to work legally. As their life savings run out, many young people now work illegally, sacrificing their education for long hours and meagre wages. For those lucky enough to not have to work, their education has so disrupted that some have to sit in classes for students two or three years their junior.
The UN Higher Commission for Refugees is the main international organisation providing aid and assistance to Iraqi refugees in Syria. We are collaborating with UNHCR to deliver a course in photojournalism for young Iraqi refugees, giving them the opportunity and the skills to express themselves and tell their stories to a wider audience.
Kosovo:
In Kosovo we will be working with two groups of young people from the divided town of Mitrovica. Kosovo’s declaration of independence on February 17th 2008 has threatened to re-ignite the deep-lying tensions between the ethnically Serbian and Albanian populations which fuelled the bloody Kosovo War in 1999 and the ethnic violence in 2004. Mitrovica has been a focal point for this conflict. After the war it was divided between the ethnic-Serb majority north of the river and the ethnic-Albanian majority to the south. Serious tensions between the two halves of the town remain to this day. New Exposure will work with young people from both sides of the river, encouraging them to examine the effect living in a climate of such resentment and potential for violence has had.
Germany, a secure democracy with a strong economy, has recently begun to encourage Iraqis it has accepted s refugees to return to their homes, despite there being little evidence that the sectarian violence they fled from has diminished. We will work with a group of young Iraqi refugees who have been living in Germany and encourage them to use photography to articulate their experience of living as a refugee in such a different culture, and what the future holds for them in Iraq.
Using Olympus cameras New Exposure is able to offer these young people a chance to express themselves which the circumstance of their lives has denied them so far. Their stories will be given a wider audience here in the UK. We will hold an exhibition of the images in London, before they travel around to a number of different locations across the UK. We are collaborating with the UNHCR in the UK to exhibit the images around the country. The work will then be published in a book about the project.